Brad Riffee

Nineteen Fairmont State University students will witness an important moment in American history by participating in a 10-day academic seminar in Washington, D.C., focusing on the U.S. Presidential Inauguration.

English major and Michigan native Brad Riffee is creating a plan that could lead to the first rooftop gardens across the Fairmont State University campus.

For Riffee, who has family roots in West Virginia, a summer of high tech gardening was also a way of impacting his community. His inspiration came from Voltaire’s comic novel “Candide,” where the hero establishes a small farm on which he and his friends keep themselves from the three great evils: poverty, vice and boredom.